High availability (HA) at the application tier for the CLM and SSE products can be achieved leveraging VMware technology and tools. VMware technology and tools permit hosting and managing server assets in private and cloud deployments that are deployed on x86 hardware architecture.

Assumptions

Topology has each CLM and SSE app on separate servers with distinct names (links)

Hardware and operating system are x86 compatible

Approach

At a high level, these are the steps most of our VMware customers follow:

Have ready a standby client virtual machine

This may be achieved through cloning the virtual machine from within the VMware tools

Monitor the active VM and set triggers / alerts in case of failure

This may be achieved through monitoring in the VMware toolset, or using other monitoring tools

Provision (activate) the standby VM

This may be achieved automatically with the VMware toolset or manually (using scripts or actual human intervention)

Configure traffic to new VM

This may be achieved automatically with the VMware toolset or manually (using scripts or actual human intervention)

Implementation suggestions

VMware vSphere ESXi can manage virtual machines on a single hypervisor. In this context, a standby VM needs to be readied. This can be done through cloning the VM so that a separate server is ready but not active. There may be manual steps to activate the prepared VM and to ensure the front-ending load balancer routes traffic to the new VM.

VMware vSphere vMotion technology permits creating a cluster or group of multiple hypervisors whose resources are managed as a pool. Virtual machines may move transparently from one hypervisor to another without apparent end-user involvement or awareness. This technology compensates for variability in a hypervisor cluster due to changes in virtual machine load or unexpected hardware issues at the hypervisor level.